Multimedia has enjoyed huge popularity with the proliferation of the Internet, the augmentation of the Internet with high-speed communication methods (such as Digital Subscriber line—DSL), and cheap, relatively fast home computers. The everyday user has little trouble surfing the Internet, but when audio and especially video presentations are available to enhance the user's experience, the average user is often frustrated by the implementation of such media presentations and their ability to experience them. Generally, online media presentations are of poor audio and video quality, and they lack any intelligent type of indexing of interesting portions of the presentation or a method for finding and commenting on portions of a presentation.
A known way to provide a media presentation to a user is to provide a hyperlink to the file that can be downloaded and viewed on a generic software playback interface; however, this suffers from severe drawbacks.
First, it is difficult to integrate text with an audio-visual presentation in an effective manner such that the text may be searched and used to index the presentation. A known method for including text in a media presentation is the use of dialog subtitles at the bottom of the screen where the subtitles are a language translation of the audio track, but this provides no way for the user to advance to a portion of a multimedia presentation based on a specific subtitle. Another known method, which is similar to subtitles, is prevalent in the motion picture industry where opening credits and closing credits (aka, the “crawl”) are added as text overlays. Once again, these methods do not assist with finding specific points within a presentation. Generally, none of these methods allow the average user to add such text to a presentation.
Second, it is difficult for the user to find a specific moment within a multimedia presentation that they wish to view. A known method for finding a specific moment within a multimedia presentation is the use of a scroll bar that is linked to the multimedia presentation such that the scroll bar “throw” (movement of the scroll bar within a limiting region) relates to the entire length of the multimedia presentation and moving the bar within the “throw” moves the multimedia presentation to a point of time in relation thereto. Unfortunately, the “throw” of a scroll bar is generally limited and fixed such that small movements of the scroll bar can advance a multimedia presentation several minutes, thus finding a specific moment within a multimedia presentation can be very difficult, frustrating, and often impossible.
Another known method for finding a specific moment within a multimedia presentation is the use of “fast-forward” and “rewind” controls. Similar to scroll bars, such controls can lack the fine resolution needed to zero in on a specific moment in a multimedia presentation.
Another known method for finding a specific moment within a multimedia presentation is the use of preset index points such as the scene delineations used on DVDs and track separations on CDs. These types of index points are often too coarse. Some movies are two hours or more in length with only 15 or 20 scene breaks; meaning that each scene could be as much as 10 minutes in length such that a user could waste many minutes waiting for the portion of the scene they wish to view.
Therefore, there is a need for a more effective method of viewing a media presentation that overcomes the disadvantages of conventional methods discussed above.
Like element numbers in different figures represent the same or similar elements.